Let me
preface this by saying that I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan. I’ve been into his music
since my mid-teens. He’s the reason why I write songs. In fact, I’d be willing
to say that I’m a bigger Dylan fan than you, reader, whoever you might be. I
could write a book on the guy – in fact, someday I’d quite like to. I know my
Dylanology, is what I’m
trying to say.
He didn’t deserve that Nobel Prize,
though.
Don’t get me wrong – he’s arguably
the greatest songwriter of the last hundred years, at least in the English
language, and an astounding singer as well. What he isn’t, though, is an author
– that is, he doesn’t write books. Apart from his autobiography and the
speed-addled ramblings collected in Tarantula,
Bob Dylan’s contribution to the world of literature consists of a single poem,
“Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” written in the sixties. While that is a good
poem, it’s not Nobel Prize-worthy, and even if it were, they don’t give out
Nobel Prizes based on single poems (or at least, I hope they don’t). Bob Dylan
is a songwriter - his work is to combine words and music, and then to perform
them. You don’t read a song. You hear it. I would have hoped that was obvious
enough not to need saying, but apparently the Nobel Committee weren’t aware. Maybe
they suffer from some unique form of synaesthesia that causes them to interpret sounds
as written words (in which case, that sounds both awesome and very
inconvenient) but I doubt it; more likely, they were trying to prove that they
were down with the kids by honouring a seventy-five-year-old folksinger who
hasn’t made a great album since 1997. Sort of like how the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences tried to prove they cared about slavery and the
historical oppression of black people by honouring Twelve Years A Slave, the most sanitized portrait of slavery since Gone With The Wind. But let’s not get
sidetracked into talking (again) about how fucking dreadful that film was. My
point is that the Nobel Committee, in all likelihood, don’t give a shit about
Dylan or his body of work. I’d be willing to bet they’ve heard, at most, maybe
half a dozen of his songs, and they probably didn’t like them. I have nothing
against a good publicity stunt, but this is a Nobel Prize for Literature – it’s
not some meaningless bauble that anybody can win, like a Nobel Peace Prize.
This matters.
Wait a
minute. Be very, very quiet. Be so silent you’re barely breathing, and you’ll
hear it, a whisper on the wind, rising like a belch from the unwashed mouths of
a million pretentious undergraduates, the eternal battlecry of the musical
pseud:
He’s not a lyricist! He’s a poet!
Sorry, but
no. No, he isn’t. That’s not my opinion, by the way – it’s an objective fact.
Bob Dylan writes songs, not poems.
Again, you’d think that would be
obvious, but it isn’t. Not to the army of “journalists” and hipsters who rush
out to brand every half-decent songwriter a poet, and study their lyrics in
complete isolation from their music or their performance. These people are to
music what pigeons are to statues. It’s as if they can’t bring themselves to
admit that songs have any artistic merit. Music, of course, is one thing;
they’ll ooh and aah over the brilliance of Bach and Stravinsky all you want,
and of course they’ll be able to quote poetry all day long. The worth of words
in isolation, and music in isolation, is inarguable to them. But, to them,
that’s it; that’s the limit of their artistic consciousness. So when they hear
a song, they’ll judge the lyrics by the standards of poetry (a medium in which
the words stand alone) and the music by the standards of classical music (a
medium in which the sound stands alone), with no awareness of the fact that the
two require each other. In a song, the lyrics rely on the music and vice versa.
While there are songwriters whose lyrics can be read as poetry (Joni Mitchell,
Bill Callahan) and even some whose music could function as instrumentals (Frank
Zappa, Scott Walker), most do not fit into that category. If you actually try
to read Bob Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, they fail miserably, and the same goes
for his music when taken without his voice and lyrics. The magic – the thing
that makes him a genius – is what happens when you put the two together. That’s
how a song works, and that’s what the Nobel Committee will never understand.
Murakami wouldn’t have deserved to
win either.
No comments:
Post a Comment